Monangambé | LEFFEST - Lisboa Film Festival

A wife visits her husband in prison. Before she departs, she trusts him with a promise, but the guard watching them reveals their secret to the prison director. Because of a misunderstanding regarding the language spoken and the word used, the characters will be submitted to brutal interrogations and fight for their lives. This film, based on the Angolan cry of “Monangambee!” meaning “white death”, paints these communities’ fear, as Maldoror details in this short-film.

Duration: 18
Production year: 1969
Country: Algeria
Subtitles: min Subtitles PT (Brazil)

Sarah Maldoror

Sarah Maldoror was born in 1939, daughter of a French mother and Guadeloupean father from Marie-Galante island. In 1956, she founded the theater group “Les Griottes” in Paris, which, through adaptations of Sartre and Aimé Césaire, studied the concept of “négritude”. She later won a grant from USSR in Guinea Conakry, and went to study at the Moscow Film Academy. There she met Ousmane Sembène, considered by some as the “father” of the African film. From the time she met Angolan nationalist Mário Pinto de Andrade in Paris, Maldoror plunged into the struggle for independence of the African colonies and witnessed the early days of the MPLA. Her first feature, entitled Monagambée (1968), examines torture techniques used by the French in the Algerian War, and was selected for the Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight in 1971. It was just the following year that Maldoror created her most emblematic work, Sambizanga (1972), filmed in Congo, which depicts the arrest of revolutionary activist Domingos Xavier by the Portuguese secret police from the perspective of a wife searching for her imprisoned husband.